ce and great leadings to it. That is
only a wooden horse to the father,--the child was careering to
distant scenes of conquest and crusade, through a country of
elsewhere unimagined beauty. None but poets remember
their youth; but the father who does not retain poetical
apprehension of the world, free and splendid as it stretches
out before the child, who cannot read his natural history, and
follow out its intimations with reverence, must be a tyrant in
his home, and the purest intentions will not prevent his doing
much to cramp him. Each new child is a new Thought, and has
bearings and discernings, which the Thoughts older in date
know not yet, but must learn.--

'My attention thus fixed on Shakspeare, I returned to him
at every hour I could command. Here was a counterpoise to my
Romans, still more forcible than the little garden. My author
could read the Roman nature too,--read it in the sternness of
Coriolanus, and in the varied wealth of Caesar. But he viewed
these men of will as only one kind of men; he kept them in
their place, and I found that he, who could understand the
Roman, yet expressed in Hamlet a deeper thought.

'In CERVANTES, I found far less productive talent,--'indeed,
a far less powerful genius,--but the same wide wisdom, a
discernment piercing the shows and symbols of existence, yet
rejoicing in them all, both for their own life, and as signs
of the unseen reality. Not that Cervantes philosophized,--his
genius was too deeply philosophical for that; he took things
as they came before him, and saw their actual relations and
bearings. Thus the work he produced was of deep meaning,
though he might never have expressed that meaning to himself.
It was left implied in the whole. A Coleridge comes and calls
Don Quixote the pure Reason, and Sancho the Understanding.
Cervantes made no such distinctions in his own mind; but he
had seen and suffered enough to bring out all his faculties,
and to make him comprehend the higher as well as the lower
part of our nature. Sancho is too amusing and sagacious to
be contemptible; the Don too noble and clear-sighted towards
absolute truth, to be ridiculous. And we are pleased to see
manifested in this way, how the lower must follow and serve
the higher, despite its jeering mistrust and the stubborn
realities which